A great chicken, a friendly chicken, a chicken that is ready for a relationship

The Blair government is now in a war with the BBC, which despite being state-owned, has shown more backbone than America’s private media (have I mentioned that Meet the Press solicited and received highly slanted “facts” from the Treasury Dept that it used when interrogating Howard Dean?) in going after government lying about Iraq’s military capabilities. It’s been firing off letters to the Beeb, and issuing them publicly, demanding retractions and the name of its source, and, astonishingly, giving them a deadline--of midnight, yet--to respond. The Beeb told them to fuck themselves. Oh, and at a press conference with Putin, Blair answered questions from everyone except the BBC.

Ha’aretz headline: “Israel Wants US Guarantee that Palestinian Authority Will Dismantle Terror Groups.” Well, gee, how about if they say that they’ll dismantle any unauthorized terror groups, and then let them go ahead, just as long as they don’t “celebrate.”

The Bush admin has called for the overthrow of two African governments this week (Liberia, Zimbabwe).

The US birthrate is at its lowest ever.

And this won’t help: the Supreme Court legalizes sodomy in Texas. Plan your vacations accordingly. Best headline reporting this: “Court to Texas: Butt Out.”

Other states which had anti-sodomy laws: Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah and Virginia.

Scalia says this is the start of the slippery slope to gay marriage (but only if you use the proper lubricant). And he makes this remarkable statement: “Today's opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.” So-called? He also talks about “the law professions’s anti-anti-homosexual culture.” He hilariously argues that a majority can outlaw homosexuality, that’s democracy not discrimination (not that he shares those sentiments, no don’t get him wrong). And hell, we have a history of it; he cites 4 executions for sodomy in colonial times as justification for Texas’s law.

The majority said that Texas’s law violated the “liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions.” That’s a mighty fancy way of describing one man putting his penis in another man’s.... Kennedy wrote that “there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter.” I think you can write your own joke in response to that one without any help from me. He said that the men had engaged in “sexual practices common to a homosexual lifestyle.” “Not common enough,” you can hear some men saying. (Lifestyle? Scalia talked about culture wars, Kennedy about lifestyle; they both meant fucking). Actually, reading the decision,
I find that the majority were very specifically trying to legalize not homosexual sex, but homosexuality, the right to form personal relationships of one’s choosing: “When sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring.” This is welcome, but puzzling, since they didn’t strike down the Texas law on the equal-protection grounds that it discriminated against gay sodomy(except for O’Connor), as did 3 other states; the rest banned it for heterosexuals as well, and those laws were struck down too. Rather, it ruled on the basis of the “right to liberty under the Due Process Clause,” whatever that means. In other words, 5 Supes made one ruling, but Kennedy wrote his argument as if they’d made a different one. O’Connor is clearly embarrassed at having voted the wrong way in 1986 and actively lies about that ruling, which this one overturned, saying that it was never about legislating moral disapproval--which it patently was. At any rate, the Court came to a better, wider ruling than I expected, including saying that you can’t legislate moral disapproval, but their logic sucked.

It is truly dead-old-farts week. Dennis Thatcher (Maggie’s husband), Lester Maddox and Strom Thurmond. Probably the sodomy thing that killed them.